Tool – Bloch&Østergaard ApS

Tool: How to analyze and understand your leadership project

Erik Østergaard — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 07:32:06 +0000

Tool: How to analyze and understand your leadership project

By Erik Korsvik Østergaard, dd. Month yyyy

If you want to engage your peers, your managers or your colleagues in leadership activities, you need to establish a mutual engagement and willingness to do so. That starts with a good understanding of the challenge you are tackling – or the opportunity you want to exploit. And that starts with analyzing it, so that you can convey the message and start the change. Actually, this is part of steps one and two in a leadership development program.

Here follows my personal tools and thinking patterns, which I have gathered and refined over the past two decades as business consultant, project manager, and people manager.

Understanding the situation

This is where I always start: SCQA

What is the Situation? Describe your context as sober and honest as possible. What is the business situation, the market condition, the employee situation, the funding situation etc. Describe key figures and vital signs.
What is your Challenge? Describe what hinders you or challenges you from doing what you want – or describe the opportunity you want to exploit. What problem are you solving, and why does it arise. What impediments are there?
What Question do we seek to answer? Formulate your quest, your curiosity, or your project objective/mission. The Design Thinking approach is great here: “How might we”-questions are a great way to do frame how you want to address the challenge.
What is our hypothetical Answer? Describe what you expect to create/establish/make possible/obtain from solving the challenge.

Continue with Why

Ask yourself: That is the purpose of your activity? What problem are you solving? What opportunity are exploiting.

Avoid falling in the product trap and be madly in love with a product or a tool. Any activity should be decoupled from that, and instead focus on capabilities, challenges, and value creation. Use the Impact Story as a great way to start.

Then, describe the value you want to create, both non-tangible value (capabilities, emotions, interpersonal etc.) and tangible value (profit, market share, growth, products, KPIs etc.).

Understanding the organizational change

Make sure to describe your change. Are you pushing or pulling the change?

What changes?
Is it driven by internal or external forces?
Is it planned or unforeseen?
Is it simple or complex?
And what “collateral damage” will we accept, e.g. people leaving the organization, missed deadlines, higher cost in a period etc.?

Some people like to use the ADKAR model to analyze the situation in the organization and describe the proposed activities.

Awareness of the need for change
Desire to support the change
Knowledge of how to change
Ability to demonstrate skills and behaviors
Reinforcement to make the change stick

Describing your proposed activity

Make sure to describe your project/activity through all six angles: STCQRR

What is the Scope?
- Organizational scope: Who and what is affected? Use the blast radius-tool for this.
- Activity scope: What activities do you propose to initiate?
- Delivery scope: What do you expect to deliver? A document? A feeling? A skill? A tool? Or?
What is the Time frame?
- How long time do you expect your project to last? What phases to you go through?
What is the Cost?
- What is your estimate for internal cost and external cost?
- What is your estimate for other elements like software, material, experiments etc.?
How do you ensure Quality?
- What processes do you apply?
- What conversations do you have – and how do you apply the learning?
What Risks are there?
- Use the structure: There is a risk that , leading to . The probability for it is . The impact is . To mitigate it, we .
What Resources do you need?
- Who do you need, when, and for what?

Conveying the message

You need to communicate with two groups of people: Those that makes the decision and provides the investment for it, and those that are affected.

In both cases you need to understand:

Who are you talking to?
What are their preferred channel (email, phone, PowerPoint, meeting, etc)?
What are their communicative preferences? Do they look for business cases, money, profit, numbers, dates, feelings and emotions, stories, competitions, logic arguments, a narrative and a good story – or a mix?
What noise filters will there be when you send the message to them?
How do you ensure a good feedback loop, so that you know that the message is received the way you want it?
What noise filter do you have yourself?

Finally, work together!

Be sure to create the analysis and presentation with someone. Thinking out loud is a great way to create better solutions and consistency, and to identify mistakes.

We call it “rubber ducking“.

/Erik

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The newsletter is filled with articles and tools for modern, future-oriented leaders. In this we strive to share relevant insights on stuff like the Future of Work, on transformation, on mega trends, on millennials, motivation and on how to create a happy, productive workplace. Not all in one newsletter, but now you know what to expect.

Tool: The agenda of a modern department meeting

Erik Østergaard — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 05:24:48 +0000

Tool: The agenda of a modern department meeting

By Erik Korsvik Østergaard, 7. October 2019

Oh, the classic department meeting. So tedious and boring. But wait, it does not have to be. If you rearrange the elements of the meeting, then the flow and the mood changes. Here is how to do that.

The classic department meeting is boring

The classic department meeting goes something like this:

“Welcome everybody. Let’s dive straight to it. Here are the sales numbers from this month. And as you see (…) Next up is a tour around the table to share what we’re working on. Tim, you start (…) Right, let’s get back to work”.

One hour spent. Or wasted. We can do better than that.

Sustainable Leadership is the backbone of the agenda

Sustainable Leadership is the understanding of juggling a mutual and coherent focus on

our raison d’être and our identity
our social capital,
our value-creating tasks,
and our profitable business.

It is a wholesome mindset and approach to meaningfulness, context, human beings, and the health and growth of your business.

With that in mind, let’s rearrange the order of the agenda items, and reframe some of the dialogue. Here is the modern agenda for the modern department meeting.

Inspired? Buy the book The Responsive Leader!

The modern agenda for the modern organization

Purpose

“So, what have you done this week, to support our purpose?”

Your opening question is the anchor point for your dialogue the next hour. Meaningful work and value-creating tasks are a vital item of the modern workplace (albeit not without business value and revenue). Starting the meeting with that question strengthens your direction, your identity, and your transactional work. See also the so-called Impact Stories, that are a great frame for describing your activities. And this blog post on how to find and activate your organizations why.

People

“News about people: John became father last night. Amy got promoted. Jim is on vacation.” etc.

This is followed by a session where everyone shares their reflection of the week that went:

“On a scale from 1 to 6, how was your week – and why?”

This creates a huge change to the meetings, with introduction of a human-centric “measurement”. Each team member shares their index and a reflection on why the week was fantastic, mediocre, or shitty. Everybody gets insight into the personal experiences of colleagues. We in Bloch&Østergaard uses a three-question approach: “How happy are you with your relationships? How happy are you with your results? How happy are you with your workload? And please add a comment.”

Progress

Time for “The state of the nation”, that is, news and information from management and from those that focus on the business, the market, the customers, technology, etc. This should be handled in less than 10 minutes.

Then, your department Kanban board, with walk-through of progress on the relevant activities (What was planned this week, what did we work on, what did we finalize – and what did we not succeed with, and why) and with agreement of next weeks activities from the backlog.

Profit

Last item is the classic financial overview and business KPI’s. They DO still have a place, just in the end of the meeting.

Be inspired and get the tools

We do this ourselves. The 28th podcast episode “vores rytme vores ugemøde” (in Danish) describes how we do it, including the team temperature – or the “Pirate” as we have nicknamed it.

Here is how to use the Kanban board, also for meetings.

Understanding your organizations purpose starts with the Impact Stories and continues with understanding and activating it.

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Tool: Using Kanban Board Agendas when facilitating team meetings

Erik Østergaard — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 12:57:56 +0000

Tool: Using Kanban Board Agendas when facilitating team meetings

By Puk Falkenberg, 8. April 2019

The feeling of getting things done at team meetings

Do you know the feeling of we-didn’t-get-anything-done-at-that-meeting? I sure do. In team meetings, where many different personality types and business roles are gathered, there are different mind patterns present as well as different approaches to how to get things done.

Some prefer a structured agenda with time slots to follow strictly. Others prefer a loosely set agenda with a great amount of flexibility. Those two types seldomly go well together, experiencing different versions of the same meeting.

I love facilitating workshops, team meetings, or other bigger sessions. Seeing how participants get eureka-moments and how new ideas spark gives me so much energy. Because I enjoy this so much, I also try my best to meet those two types on middle ground, making it both structured and flexible at the same time.

And because of that not-getting-things-done-feeling, I combined approaches from the lean, agile and facilitation worlds.

How to make it structured and flexible at the same time

We all have different preferred ways of thinking and approaches to understanding, and we each prioritize elements and items differently. These highlighted bullets are the reasons why you should use a Kanban Board Agenda when facilitating:

Overview: With a Kanban Board Agenda, you’ll get a backlog. A backlog that will visually show your participants or team members the fully agenda for the meeting, satisfying the types who likes a visible agenda with overview.
Ownership: Giving team members a chance to actually have a saying in which topics are on the agenda backlog, involving them in adding or removing any item on it.
Prioritization: We all know that the backlog is some kind of “wish-list” of all the things we want to get done. But we may not have the time for each item. Having the visible backlog and team members pitching in, you also need to facilitate the process of where to begin. Do you just pick a topic, or do you ask what is more pressing or more important to begin with?

I must mention that some type of people still misses the strict time slots and feeling of time control, but when I have explained the level of involvement in the Kanban Board Agenda, they often get it and start enjoying it.

Inspired? Buy the book The Responsive Leader!

The Responsive Leader is a book on how to be a fantastic leader in a constantly changing world.

How do you actually make a Kanban Board Agenda?

It’s easy. It’s a minimal amount of effort and stuff you need. Basically, just post-its, black pens and wall space. If you really want to go all in, I’ll recommend you find one of those small whiteboards or a flip over.

Next step is to make four columns: 1) Backlog, 2) to-do, 3) doing, and 4) done. You are going to need all four of them, it you want to get the full use of the Kanban Board Agenda.

Backlog: This is where you put all your topics and make the “wish-list” for the team meeting.
To-do: This is where you put the topics that you chose from the backlog, to cover in this meeting.
Doing: This is to show participant what you are currently doing (if anyone drizzles off, they can be back on track fast).
Done: This is for the topics you have been through and can celebrate putting in done.

If you want to or need, ad a parking space for things you need to park/pause either because of time, complexity or some other reason.

A Bonus you’ll get for free when facilitating with the Kanban Board Agenda

The best part about this tool is, that it helps you constantly revisit your agenda backlog, and you’ll start to meta-communicate about the topics.

Often in longer sessions or workshop, you’ll experience losing track of time when many things are going on. With this form of agenda, you have a clear overview all the time. Not hidden away on the first slides in your PowerPoint Deck. It’s there. Visible to everyone participating.

But Puk, what happens if there are still items on the backlog when time’s up?

At the end you have two possible ways to end the meeting: 1) letting everyone know that you save the rest of the backlog and bring it next time (most fitted for team meetings), or 2) letting everyone know that the rest of the backlog will be thrown out, as if it’s important it will come up again next time (if it’s a workshop that’s not going to have a part two, this might be the best way to do it).

The world and your employees have changed.
Do you want to keep up
– and shape the future?

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Tool: Modern people leadership – part 2: The rhythm

Erik Østergaard — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 11:51:26 +0000

Modern people leadership – part 2: The rhythm

By Erik Korsvik Østergaard, 24. March 2019

Modern people leadership (that is, leading a team, a project, a department, or similar that involves collaboration and dialogue) requires that you know your framework, and your rhythm.

This is the second part of a two-piece blog post about modern people leadership, about the rhythm and daily mechanisms of modern people leadership. The first part described the frame for your work and collaboration.

The rhythm of modern people leadership in teams

Once you have the framework and foundation of your team (or business unit or organization) in place, you should start paying attention to the daily and weekly cadence and maintenance of the team. This includes both people and progress and products.

In contrast to the establishment and formulation of the frame (which includes four distinct and well-scoped questions), the operationalization of the frame is not at all something you can address bit-by-bit in a formula.

Instead, it’s a mindset and approach, that addresses these challenges:

How can we ensure, that we do the right things right?
How can we create shared values and norms?
How can we create shared and mutual responsibility?
How can we create frequent and useful feedback?
How can we create energy and engagement?

From our experiences, the solution is to create a rhythm (or cadence) in your team with a higher frequency than in the old days, and with psychological safety to discuss relationships and results.

The main point is to create CONVERSATIONS across the organization.

“I got rhythm, (…) who could ask for anything more”

Yes, a hat-tip to Ira and George Gershwin. But this is crucial to modern leadership, and a vital sign of your success: How often do you touch base with your team, your colleagues, and your leaders around you? Daily? Weekly? Bi-weekly? Rarely?

Google documented, that the five things that are key to a successful Google team are

Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

I believe it’s all about frequent touchpoints, and debating the right things, namely relationships and results (studies show, that these two things create happiness at work).

Are you doing the right things?

I’m a huge fan of introducing elements from the Agile and Scrum world into the maintenance and growth of teams, business units, and organizations. Especially on C-level it has proved unusually powerful for the transparency and alignment of activities and approaches. See the case from Danske Bank in my book “The Responsive Leader“.

Establish and use a Kanban board in your work, focusing both on working IN the business and ON the business
Meet in front of the Kanban board with a suiting frequency. I prefer and recommend weekly meetings for C-level groups.
Make sure, that all the activities you identify and initiate support your direction/purpose/mission of your work.
Make sure, that you stop or adjust those activities, that do not.
Make sure, that you monitor both the activities that are ON the business and IN the business, and use the innovation matrix to map the risk and identify speedboats.

Are you doing the things right? What are your norms?

Have you ever REALLY talked about expectations to your behavior? I’m not only talking about having a shared set of values, but also on agreeing on what good behavior looks like.

What values do you share?
What behavior do you expect?
What behavior is perfect?
What behavior will you not allow?
And how can you debate situations, where you are in conflict or in doubt?

You might get inspired by the Culture Map by Strategyzer. We use it often.

Create frequent and useful feedback loops

Once you have established what you are doing and how you expect each other to behave (feedforward), you are ready to establish feedback loops. Here are a few of our favorite mechanisms.

Inspired by Scrum, make sure to have (a) demo sessions, focusing on feedback on the products and services, you are delivering, and (b) retrospectives, focusing on feedback on your collaborations. From my experience, leadership teams are not used to reflecting on their internal collaboration, at all. Do that so often, that it becomes a natural habit to ask for and to give instant feedback to each other.
Have weekly team meetings with your team, where you focus on purpose, people, progress, and profit – in that order.
Have a “team temperature”-system or a smile-o-meter on all levels, aggregating results and debates upwards to the C-level. We’ve experimented with several software components as augmentation to our leadership (see here and here), and now we use the “team temperature” ourselves:
On a scale from 1 to 5:
How happy are you with your relationships?
How happy are you with your results?
How happy are you with your workload?
We gather the data every Friday, and debate the overall result in public to share good stories and smiles, and to address things that are challenging too.
Have bi-weekly 1-on-1 conversations with your employees.
Make sure to be open and honest. Share experiences often, both successes and mistakes, to create learning. Be a responsible leader and make sure to follow-up and follow-through.
Make sure to have a good and delicate dialogue around what creates stress at work, and know how to handle it.

Create shared and mutual responsibility

Crucial to shared responsibility is to be able do delegate in a healthy and professional manner, taking into account differences in each others experience, personal profiles, motivation, and preference in the Forming-Norming-Storming-Performing model.

You can delegate both responsibility and tasks. And make sure to have an agreement on who has the actual decision mandate, you or the employee. One tool to facilitate the debate is the Delegation Poker game by Management 3.0. We describe the tool in this podcast episode, “Distribueret lederskab, en fundamental del af fremtidens lederskab” (in Danish).

Make sure to agree on how and how often you meet and touch base with each other during the work. Daily? Weekly?

Finally, make sure that you understand, that you need each other. There is a reason for you being a part of the team, and your mutual success relies on each of your work and well-being.

Create energy and engagement

Creating psychological safety has a clear correlation to the characteristics of positive psychology:

Positive emotion
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Accomplishments

This is the ultimate argument for rhythm and cadence: By mastering the mechanisms that are suitable for you and your team – e.g. like the ones above – you have the best possibility to create energy and engagement. Engagement and motivation comes from mastery, autonomy, and purpose, according to Daniel Pink. Add to that psychological safety, and you have a culture of well-being.

From my experience, a higher frequency of conversation and touchpoints is the key to creating the right culture, and the low hanging fruit of modern leadership. As a positive side effect, you get the possibility to train and sharpen your leadership skills on everyday basis, something we address in this podcast episode too, “Hønen eller ægget“.

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for the modern
future-oriented leader

Do you need input on how to get started?
Take a look at at our categorized toolbox here
– it’s all free

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Tool: Modern people leadership – part 1: The framework

Erik Østergaard — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 14:46:04 +0000

Modern people leadership – part 1: The framework

By Erik Korsvik Østergaard, 17. March 2019

Modern people leadership (that is, leading a team, a project, a department, or similar that involves collaboration and dialogue) requires that you know your framework, and your rhythm.

This is the first part of a two-piece blog post about modern people leadership, describing the frame for your work and collaboration. The second part is about the rhythm and daily mechanisms of modern people leadership.

The foundation of modern people leadership in teams

Each team or group of people that are gathered to collaborate must have a set of landmarks and foundation elements in place. The modern leader is obliged to make sure, that what you are, what you will, and then what you do are clear to all team members.

Here is my simple framework for making sure, that these building blocks are in place. This framework applies to classical, functional teams, to project teams, and operational teams too.

The tool is designed as a list of questions, that you should answer as a team. The result is a list of answers, that can be used for communication, for prioritization of tasks, and for ensuring that you are doing the right things right.

WHY are you here?
WHAT are your goals?
WHO are you?
HOW do you plan to get there?

WHY are you here?

What problem are you solving? Or what opportunity are you exploiting?
Who will it benefit? How will it benefit them?

Use the Impact Stories as a good way of describing it: We so that can .

Try asking the same question to your sponsor or steering committee, to let them describe their perception of the task. Don’t do it to expose their disagreement or lack of understanding, but to make sure – in a safe and trustful manner – that we all understand the task the same way.

WHAT are your goals?

When is the problem solved?
What is the expected output?
What is the expected outcome?
When are we done? And what is the definition of done?

Producing a piece of software is an output. Making sure that the software is useful and is used by the right people in the right way to solve THEIR problem is the outcome.

Make sure to describe this in a way, that justifies the investment in peoples time and the organizations resources (note, people are not resources, they are people): What is the measurable outcome and impact? New ways of working? Happier employees? Better financial health? Professional relationships? Better customer experience?

And then: Do we agree, that we close the project, when (and only when) the problem is solved?

WHO are you?

Are you the right people to solve the problem?
Do you have the right competences?
Do you have time and bandwidth to be part of the team?
Do you really want to join in and be part of the team, and solve the problem?
Do you understand your individual personal styles and ways of working?
Do you have proper relationships with each other?

And related to the output and outcome:

Who are your stakeholders, partners, vendors, and other collaborators?
Who are your change management agents and influencers?
And who are the people and departments, that your work will impact?

Are you really the ones, that are best fitted to solve the problem? Take a look at “the pizza model” to understand what skills that are needed – and what skills you have in the team – to see if there is a gap.

Use one of the many psychological profiling approaches (DiSC, Insights Discovery, Whole Brain, Hogan etc.) to get to know yourself and your team, and to understand your communication and collaboration differences.

Also, take a look at the “blast radius” to create a map of your impact.

HOW do you plan to get there?

What is the shared plan for your work? What are the activities, and their dependencies?
What is your mandate?
How much freedom do you want to have? And how much do you actually get?
And how do you measure progress (both on output and outcome), and make sure that you are on the right path to solving the right problem?

Use e.g. the mechanisms from Agile and Scrum to create a shared, transparent and prioritized backlog. Use Delegation Poker to align expectations to your mandate and freedom.

Using the frame actively

Modern people leadership is about handling what we will (our intent), what we are (our identity), and what we do (our activities). The frame above is a nice platform for facilitating questions and answers, and for documenting the expectations to everyone. It absolutely helps you as a leader, also if you are the CEO.

Establishing the frame is a team effort and takes from a few hours to several days (maybe even weeks) depending on the maturity of the team – and the stakeholders. It’s not unusual that it’s actually the stakeholders, that are least familiar with this kind of thinking.

The frame should be revisited with a healthy frequency, maybe every 3 months, and definitely when major events happen, like technology changes, new/changed stakeholders, when the project changes phase, or when new team members join.

The next blog post describes the rhythm of modern people leadership in teams.

Want to know more?
Send me an email
and I’ll get back to you!

Send me a mail

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and how to turn it into daily life?

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Tool: Five Traits of Leaders that Transform

Erik Østergaard — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 16:49:38 +0000

Tool: Five Traits of Leaders that Transform

By Arbresh Useini, 23. December 2018

Our studies and experience with organizational transformation shows that leaders that master these traits are the ones who carry the organization forward.

This tool will help you reflect upon these five traits in your organization. Do the leaders have these traits? Are they capable of increasing happiness, decreasing sick leave, create network relations, or increasing employee evaluations? – All this is based on your traits as a transformative leader.

Measure how transformative your leaders are

When using the five traits as a tool you’ll be able to identify the collective transformational capability among your leaders and in your organization. Does your organization have the capabilities of the future?

On this page you’ll find the five traits explained, a step-by-step guide on how to use the five traits as a tool and a link to download the tool. We strongly recommend you to read the description of the five traits as each trait should be explained in a workshop using them as tool.

Download the Five Trait Tool right here

Download

1: They get it, immediately

The people who transform are the ones, who immediately “get it” and have a natural tendency to thrive with it. To them, speaking of Future of Work and The Modern Workplace comes naturally, and they are aware of technological and societal trends, and are curious, eternal learners. The leadership style makes room for new abilities, and amplifies the existing, but untrained skills. A recent Danish study made by Lederne found, that leaders who are more curious, also understand the challenges and opportunities of the future of work. There is a clear correlation here.

2: They focus on people, planet, and profit

The transformative leader focuses both on purpose, meaningfulness, and value creation, as well as results and profit. Capabilities is nothing without value creation, hence the transformative leader focuses on how he/she can create value for the receiver, i.e. for the colleague, for the team, for the customer, for the customers customer, and for the planet. Results and profit still take a professional, strong place, but it is outbalanced (and sometimes outshined) by the quest for meaning and purpose. It’s ok to make money, if you do it in a conscious, sustainable way. Do well by doing good.

3: They break the pattern

Entering the world of the Modern Workplace requires a lot of patterns to be broken. The transformative leader focuses on a vast number of things at once. The successful transformation starts when the leader understands to replace the existing mindset with a new one, and that it implies breaking a lot of business systems, habits, and behavioural patterns. They need to work with all the elements, simultaneously: Purpose, innovation, culture, organizing, and leadership.

4: They experiment

When breaking the patterns, you need to test new things and experiment a lot. The transformative leader experiments, and tries new approaches to feedback, 1:1-conversations, project methodologies, visual planning, remote work, IT tools etc. Listen to our podcast on innovation in leadership to get inspired (in Danish: “Episode 7: Vær innovativ med dit lederskab!“)

5: They actively seek feedback and input

The transformative leader seeks feedback often and uses it openly and transparently for improving the culture, wellbeing, and behaviour. Also, the transformative leader constantly listens to input from inspirational sources, reads articles, listens to podcasts, and in general stays alert and hungry. Check our blog post on feedback loops in the organization.

Use the tool in three ways

You can use this tool in three ways: as a self-assessment, for mapping your capabilities among your leader group or as an organizational mapping. The value created by using this tool will be threefold: 1) You’ll learn which traits you have, 2) what traits you have as a leadership team (and which you are lacking), and 3) which traits your organization have, or lack, which will give you an indication of the collected transformative capability.

We recommend that you start by using the tool for mapping the traits among management and leaders.

How to get going

This step-by-step guide will explain to you how the traits can be an assessment in your leader group.

Assemble all leaders and create groups of five. Have a free table or spot to use as an extra group. We’ll get back to why in a bit.
Introduce all five traits by using the descriptions from this blog post.
Hand out a print with all five traits to each participant, cut out like playing cards. Each person in every group should have a set with all five traits.
Now each person must assess their colleagues and choose one trait to give to each member in the group, leaving you with one trait for yourself and four to give away.
After each member have assessed the traits they master and what they their colleagues master, everyone should have five cards. If someone have trouble giving away a trait-card or nobody have that specific trait in the group, use the extra group or table reserved to place the card. At the end of the session you’ll see which traits are lacking according to each group. Maybe one group place trait 5, and another group trait 3. This could indicate that these specific traits are in the organization, just not in that specific group.
Give the groups time to reflect upon which traits they have been given and what they chose to hold on to – does anyone have five evens? Why were you given that specific trait and why did you give away that specific trait?
Turn the attention towards how the different traits are divided in the groups. Did any groups have problems giving away one of the traits? Are there any trends in which traits belong to which person or group?
The last reflection of this session could be an assessment of the whole group. Do you lack any specific traits and competences you need to look for in the next hire? Is there a trait that is important for the value you create or your ability to innovate that is missing or too weak?

If you want to take this talk to the next level and discuss how you can work with the traits look at our Pizza Model for how to develop new traits in three different levels.

Leaders who are enabling to transform organizations, not only have these five traits, but also apply the five guiding principles to their work.

People first.
Purpose, meaning, sense-making and value creation.
Continuous innovation and experimentation.
An insatiable drive for results.
Everybody has the opportunity to take a lead.

You can read more about the five guiding principles in the book The Responsive Leader.

Download the Five Trait Tool right here

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Tool: Impact Stories

Erik Østergaard — Sun, 16 Dec 2018 16:41:55 +0000

Tool: Impact Story

By Arbresh Useini, 16. December 2018

This tool helps you understand what impact you have, not focusing at the product but focusing on what problem you solve and what value you create.

This blog describes what the Impact Story tool can do for your organization, how to use it, and how we at Bloch&Østergaard use it.

Impact – a different view on strategy

Many organizations focus on a 3-year strategy and expect it to be enough. The decision makers take a few days offsite to develop a 3-year forecast for the organization. Often, it’s based on here-and-now factors, focusing on numbers without involving any employees. When they are done, they return to the office presenting forecasts, must-win-battles, strategic focus areas and their 3-year vision – maybe even visualize it on the cantina wall. From here, the decision makers sit back and expect the organization to follow through.

But experience has also taught us, that after a few weeks people forget it and goes back to their day-to-day tasks. Somehow the big 3-year strategy hides itself on the wall. Why? Because a 3-year strategy doesn’t make us aware of why we do what we do, and what impact the we have in the world, to our customers, and to our employees.

Leaders and employees should understand why the company does what it does, what problems we are solving as a team, but most importantly: for whom, and what’s the impact of the work?

Therefore, we present the Impact Story Template. By using this tool, you and your employees will come closer to understanding what kind of impact you have and who it’s for. It helps you understand the value you create when you solve problems as an organization:

We
so that
can

Download the Impact Story Template right here

Download

What does the Impact Story template do for your organization?

The Impact Story helps you understand:

What problem you solve,
for whom you solve it,
and what value you’re creating.

You will notice the template creates a good debate about framing and wording, discussing what the real values are and for whom it benefits. By the end of the discussing it should have made the employees reflect on why they go to work, what their impact is, that supports the company’s purpose.

How to get going?

Download the Impact Story Tool. Then, follow these steps on how to use the tool:

Gather groups of 4-5 people, with a mix of leaders and employees, and from across the organization
Start in the middle of the template: WHO are you working for? Map out the different personas that you create value for.
Then for each persona, describe what actions you perform; and what value that creates.
Gather all the templates on a board and bulk together those with matching themes.
Use the result for focusing your energy and resources on the right activities; those that solves the right problems for your customers and employees, and that fit with your mission and purpose.

The expert level

Also, it gets you a step closer on creating an impact accounting, that is, a feedback loop that measures your non-financial results.

Based on the understanding of the impact, you can setup feedback loops with employees and customers, getting an understanding of the functional and emotional value, that you create. The value can be tangible and non-tangible, and the feedback look will be both qualitative and quantitative.

Make it a habit

After being aware of your organizations impact, it should become a habit for you to continuously understand, what kind of impact you do.

At Bloch&Østergaard we use the Impact Stories at our half-year strategy days, and a miniature version of this every Friday at our weekly meetings. Our purpose is to create organizations, where people want to show up. We start our Friday meetings by asking each other “what have you done this week to fulfill our purpose?”. By answering this question it helps us understand, what kind of impact we ave regarding our purpose as an organization, internally and externally.

I suggest you incorporate the Impact Story as a routine in your organization too, on 1:1 meetings, at business unit seminars, when you prioritize activities, and when you acknowledge peoples work. See more examples in the blog post on How to create your organizations WHY.

Download the Impact Story Template right here

Download

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Tool: The Pizza Model

Erik Østergaard — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 16:27:57 +0000

Tool: The Pizza Model

By Arbresh Useini, 9. December 2018

This tool – with a very original name – can be used in many different ways, when you are leading a team, creating teams-of-teams, looking at new organizational structures or having regular one-to-ones. The Pizza Model helps you create a simple division between roles and tasks, as well as guiding you about capabilities and skills.

In this post we’ll describe the tool for you. First an introduction to the four pizza slides. Secondly how you can use the model to improve competences. Thirdly how you can use it when delegating tasks, and finally how to solve problems using the Pizza Model.

Download the complete version of the Pizza Model here

Download

How to use the ‘Pizza Model’ in your organization

The ‘Pizza Model’ shows four areas, that describe the components of roles in an organization. First we’ll describe these roles and orientations, then you can download the tool and read more ways to use it in your team and organization.

The four orientations in the Pizza Model:

The Business orientation, focusing on business understanding, vision and strategy. One must understand why and how the business is moving. To understand the value chain, R&D, production, marketing, internal and external actors, processes etc. is an inevitable part of this orientation.
The People orientation, focusing on personal and interpersonal skills. It involves both coaching and mentoring, which again can be divided into both micro and macro coaching/mentoring. Factors such as emotional intelligence, conflict handling and motivation are natural entities in this area. Towards the employee, the manager has the responsibility to ensure daily support and instruction regarding the tasks and the handling of those.
The Delivery orientation, focusing on processes, products, and projects, and all related elements of getting things done. Particularly delivery managers must focus on this, on facilitation and on project managing. Building, testing and analysis are inevitable elements in this orientation.
The Specialist orientation, focusing on professional skills for craftsmanship. The specialist orientation is from a leader’s perspective to respect and cultivate the professionalism of the teams. Delegating tasks in teams also is about trusting the specialist orientation – and understanding when the employees are better skilled than the manager.

Managers have all four orientations as her responsibility: She understands what business she’s in, is responsible for delivering the products, has the necessary skills at hand, and is responsible for the employees in her business unit.

Improving competences with the Pizza Model

Use the model to map and develop employee competencies, capabilities and skills. What are you good at? Where do you need to learn? And where can you teach others your skills? Through regular dialogues you as a leader can understand where the employee feels they should improve.

Divide the circle intro three levels:

Learning, the employee is in learning mode. From here he needs to move into the ‘doing’ level.
Doing, when the employee masters the skill, and practices it regularly with success.
Teaching, when the employee masters it at a level, that they can teach others.

Now, map in all tasks and skills in each pizza slide.

You will most likely have skills in learning, doing or teaching levels, for each pizza slide
And you will most likely have two pizza slices, where you feel most at home.
Now, make a plan for where you want to develop: Create two goals that you can reach within two months. Should you strengthen a skill in ‘learning mode’? Should you be a teacher for someone?

Each step indicates at which level the employees is at regarding each pizza slide. It is your responsibility to make sure the employee can move to the next level.

Download the complete version of the Pizza Model here

Download

Next step: delegate, delegate, delegate

Distributed leadership creates a bubbly development in your organization and increases creativity, productivity and efficiency. Also, teams-of-teams automatically implies delegating tasks.

You can take the following steps:

Make a list of all your tasks and the decisions you have.
Find out if the tasks and decisions are the right places, that is, if the employees and colleagues have the right skill set to handle it – use the ‘Pizza Model’ to this.
Offer the tasks to those who have the willingness, time, and skill to run with them.
Be sure to capture misunderstandings or erroneous assumptions by having frequent touch-points between you, with briefing on progress, etc.

One must understand that delegating is based on a mix of needs from the project and the employees wishes, handled as a collaboration between the manager and the employee. This means, that the tasks and the pizza slices of the model are distributed to the team-of-teams, managed by the manager.

More than often an employee or manager typically prefers only two of the four pizza slices. This means, that having the option to distribute the leadership tasks and consequently re-aligning personal preferences with the newly emerged roles is a relief to some. They get released from the tasks, that they don’t feel skilled for or like, and gains new traction and well-being in their new role.

Solve problems with the model

You can also use the tool the other way around, starting with a project or a problem to solve.

In October we held a Hacktober, trying to hack future problems. We used the ‘Pizza Model’, to find out, who in our organizations are capable of handling potential future problems as well as where we need to increase focus to handle the potential problems.

When solving a problem, the model can be used to understand which capabilities are needed to solve it.

Start by asking four questions:

Which problems do we want to resolve?
Who does it affect?
What happens if we don’t solve this problem?
What happens if we solve it?

Look at the four orientations from the model and which orientations will be affected by the problem or is useful to solve it. Afterwards assess who in the organization has the
capabilities to solve the problem.

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Tool: The Innovation Matrix

Erik Østergaard — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 16:19:05 +0000

Tool: The Innovation Matrix

By Arbresh Useini, 07. December 2018

It is predicted, that 40% of the fortune 500 companies will be gone or dramatically changed in 10 years, so innovation and continuous adaption to the market matters. We’ve seen the decline of many companies. Nokia, Blockbuster, and Kodak are the classical ones. Lately in Denmark we have seen Top-Toy/Fætter BR take the same path.

The value the Innovation Matrix will help you get

On regular basis, we meet leaders who are frustrated and asking questions on how to drive innovation and change that are transforming. Sometimes, they feel they are already doing transforming innovation pivoting their business. Often, they haven’t got a clear overview about what the difference from mundane improvements and everyday maintenance to radical change and strategic pivoting. The easy solution is to get an overview, a mapping, of innovation initiatives/projects/programmes or the like, and be able to see how much effort, time and budget should be allocated to each. The Innovation Matrix will be able to help you get this overview.

In short, you’ll get:

A mapping of all innovation initiatives divided into the four squares of the Innovation Matrix.
An alignment in your team/organization about which type of innovation you are practicing.
A picture of which kind of leadership style is necessary in each square.
A shared language on innovation, that helps facilitate a dialogue on scope, time, cost, quality, risk and resources.

Map how you do innovation in The Innovation Matrix

Innovation Matrix is a model that helps you map and understand how innovation in your organization takes place. The model is co-created with Maz Spork and Søren Skov.

The model describes the four areas of innovation; Maintain, Evolve, Grow and Transform, and each one of them has a different leadership style.

It has a two-dimensional spectrum of innovation; 1. strategic or everyday and 2. radical or improve.

We’ve made it easy: download this tool and get started!

If you download this tool you’ll find:

a description og each element in The Innovation Matrix,
a workbook about how to facilitate a workshop with you team, and
a printable version of the matrix.

Download The Innovation Matrix Right Here

Download

Want to know more?

If you want to read more into the Innovation Matrix, you can read about it on the blog Map Your Innovation Spectrum and Transform Your Business or read our blog about Driving The Change The Innovation Brings.

Or listen to our podcast episode 5 on the innovative mindset, episode 6 on why to innovate and episode 7 on innovative leadership style (all in Danish).

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Tool: Does your organization have the capabilities of the future?

Erik Østergaard — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 13:08:29 +0000

Tool: Does your organization have the capabilities of the future?

By Puk Falkenberg, 26. September 2018

The rate and impact of change in the business world is unprecedented (watch Gary Hamel, Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishments, 2011 on YouTube), and instills an urgency of change in our organizations, and in ourselves. However, it’s hard to change without knowing what to change towards. You need a useful reference point. A guiding point. Something that is somewhat stable – or at least gives a sense of stability.

Several leadership thinkers point towards a higher focus on capabilities, your HOW, rather than your production directly, your WHAT. So, why not let the guiding point for change be your organizational capabilities that you need for the future of work?

Research shows that we need to upgrade our skills faster and faster, as half-life of a learned skill is only 5 years. This means, that you need to stay in the loop at all times to see how a certain area of your expertise evolves over the next five years. Maybe that is easier with tangible skills within IT systems, robotics, trains or any other physical product, than it is with intangible skills such as empathy, warmth, and meaningfulness as well as the skill to listen and understand.

Either way, we need to look at our organizations and figure out how we as a whole can learn and adapt to the future of work.

Understand the capabilities you need

Take a look at these 10 capabilities characterizing responsive organizations, as documented in The Responsive Leader by Erik Korsvik Østergaard. How do we know if we are good at it? Or if we lack one or two – or maybe even 8 of them? Further down I’ll give you an easy and small assessment tool, but first, let’s look at the 10 capabilities.

These ten characteristics of modern organizations are described in this LinkedIn-post, by Erik Korsvik Østergaard.

Where do you begin?

It’s the classic dilemma, which capability should you develop or focus on first? If you want to do intense sprints, you may need smaller project teams. If you want relations instead of only skills, you need to listen, then decide. If you want better rather than more, you may need to step down from the Ivory Tower. All of the capabilities are connected – and needed in some form.

This means that there shouldn’t be a classic dilemma about which capability should be the first to implement. It should be more about how to begin with a small part of each and look at the affect they have on each other. Maybe it’ll be easier to work in intense sprints if you already have small project teams no larger than two pizzas?

Of course you may find 2-3 of the 10 capabilities easier to work with than others, depending on the context of your organization. And maybe you already think you are good at 1-2 of the capabilities.

Then it’s about figuring out the following:

Which capabilities are most important to you at the moment?
Which capabilities can you do something about right now?
Which capabilities would add the highest business value for the whole organization?
Which capabilities are easier to implement than others?
Which capabilities will have a high impact on your organization now?
Which capabilities should you prioritize first?

My suggestion to you is this:

Download and print the assessment tool, and cut out the ten capabilities for responsive organizations.
Gather a small group of people from different teams and departments of your organization.
Assess each of the ten by asking the questions above.

Hopefully you’ll end up having a mapping (and prioritization) of the ten capabilities along with ideas on how and which you should begin with. Maybe you’ll experience the mapping to add distinctive character to your organization matching the organizational WHY and your values. Or maybe, you’ll have the opposite feeling of a gap between capabilities and WHO you are. Like you are missing something.

The important thing is, that this is the first step towards working with your capabilities, and ways of working, to become more responsive for the future of work.

Download the Capability Assessment Tool

Download

Next step will be to make change interventions and run experiments to see which ideas will get you in the right direction of enhancing your organizational capabilities.

And remember. Everything you do will affect how you run, grow, and transform your business. When you change how you are organized it will affect your culture, leadership etc., and when you change the way you lead it will affect the others.

Want to know more?
Send me an email
and I’ll get back to you!

Send me a mail

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